The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the only ones in which he was really interested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic library of books on these subjects, to which he was always adding others that he bought from the colporteurs of medical pornography who are continually pestering the members of his profession. These he would pore over at night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his final. “Medicine is an extremely interesting profession from that point of view,” he would say, and indeed the dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great number of his patients. In the squalid underways of the city he had established a reputation for skill and discretion in the treatment of contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who came to Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to pay through the nose for his advice.

One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of these cases that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a tone that was familiar in the patient’s voice. Listening more closely he could have sworn it was the voice of Griffin. Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his examination.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like a prescription?”

“No, you’d better make it up for me,” said the voice that resembled that of Griffin.

“Certainly . . . delighted.”

Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the curtain to Edwin. Edwin, looking at once for the name at the head of the prescription, was disappointed. The patient had preferred to remain anonymous. He dispensed the medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye to the patient he could not resist the temptation of looking from behind the curtain to verify his suspicions. He could only see the back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a queer sensation of awe.

It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred to him in hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often enough in private practice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin and his friends, a person about whose adventures and their consequences he would easily and naturally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and W.G. in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity and probably some irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could do nothing of the sort. He had become, for the first time in his life, the keeper of a professional secret. For the rest of the world, however interested, Griffin and Griffin’s disease must not exist.

Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such secrets and that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade. Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . .

Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road, on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.” And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . . .

He thought no more of Griffin.